Darkness Now Visible addresses readers who are concerned about the future of democracy in the US and elsewhere. This book offers a bold and original thesis and explains why feminism, joining men and women, is the key to resistance.

From Hillary Clinton to Ivanka Trump and from Emma Watson all the way to Beyoncé, more and more high-powered women are unabashedly identifying as feminists in the mainstream media. In the past few years feminism has indeed gained increasing visibility and even urgency. Yet, in her analysis of recent bestselling feminist manifestos, well-trafficked mommy blogs, and television series such as The Good Wife, Catherine Rottenberg reveals that a particular variant of feminism-which she calls neoliberal feminism-has come to dominate the cultural landscape, one that is not interested in a mass women's movement or struggles for social justice. Rather, this feminism has introduced the notion of a happy work-family balance into the popular imagination, while transforming balance into a feminist ideal. So-called "aspirational women" are now exhorted to focus on cultivating a felicitous equilibrium between their child-rearing responsibilities and their professional goals, and thus to abandon key goals that have historically informed feminism, including equal rights and liberation. Rottenberg maintains that because neoliberalism reduces everything to market calculations it actually needs feminism in order to "solve" thorny issues related to reproduction and care. She goes on to show how women of color and poor and immigrant women most often serve as the unacknowledged care-workers who enable professional women to strive toward balance, arguing that neoliberal feminism legitimates the exploitation of the vast majority of women while disarticulating any kind of structural critique. It is not surprising, then, that this new feminist discourse has increasingly dovetailedwith conservative forces. In Europe, gender parity has been used by Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders to further racist, anti-immigrant agendas, while in the United States, women's rights has been invoked to justify interventions in countries with majority Muslim populations. And though campaigns such as the #MeToo and #TimesUp appear to be shifting the discussion, given our frightening neoliberal reality, these movements are currently insufficient. Rottenberg therefore concludes by raising urgent questions about how we can successfully reorient and reclaim feminism as a social justice movement.

The New York Times–bestselling memoir of crippling depression and the struggle for recovery by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Sophie’s Choice. In the summer of 1985, William Styron became numbed by disaffection, apathy, and despair, unable to speak or walk while caught in the grip of advanced depression. His struggle with the disease culminated in a wave of obsession that nearly drove him to suicide, leading him to seek hospitalization before the dark tide engulfed him. Darkness Visible tells the story of Styron’s recovery, laying bare the harrowing realities of clinical depression and chronicling his triumph over the disease that had claimed so many great writers before him. His final words are a call for hope to all who suffer from mental illness that it is possible to emerge from even the deepest abyss of despair and “once again behold the stars.” This ebook features a new illustrated biography of William Styron, including original letters, rare photos, and never-before-seen documents from the Styron family and the Duke University Archives.

The first book to examine the spiritual and therapeutic practice of retreat in physical darkness to explore inner light • Shows how experiencing complete darkness over prolonged periods helps in developing mental clarity and creativity • Draws upon many indigenous and spiritual traditions that use this technique The use of ceremonial darkness is a classic and cross-cultural method for exploring hidden aspects of unconscious and super-conscious states, accessing invisible landscapes, and embracing the deeper recesses of the self. In Darkness Visible Heaven and Buxton examine the spiritual and therapeutic practice of taking retreat in physical darkness. For millennia mystics and sages have used darkness as a spiritual tool for breaking with their pasts, prior conditioning, and the limited reality of their societies. Spiritual seekers from many traditions--Celtic, Eastern, indigenous North and South American, Tibetan, and African--have used darkness as a tool for spiritual enlightenment. Heaven and Buxton show how experiencing complete darkness, even for only a period of hours, brings about a remarkable clarity and mental stillness and thus provides a springboard for creativity, intuition, and spiritual development. They include exercises that explore lucid levels of dream consciousness, drawing both from their experience as teachers of this method and from the many cultures that include this practice in their spiritual traditions. Darkness Visible shows how deprivation of sight can truly teach us to see.

Afghanistan is a collection of stunning, lyrical photographs from an acclaimed, prize-winning photojournalist. From 1994 to 2006, Seamus Murphy photographed the effects of the Taliban regime, the tumultuous years of civil war, and the historical elections following the fall of the Taliban. Alongside scenes of war and politics, his magnificent photographs capture intimate images of domesticity, work, and leisure. Seamus Murphy has won six World Press Photo awards and has received widespread acclaim for his work in Afghanistan and the Middle East.

One of the best books ever written on one of humanity’s greatest epics, W. R. Johnson’s classic study of Vergil’s Aeneid challenges centuries of received wisdom. Johnson rejects the political and historical reading of the epic as a record of the glorious prehistory of Rome and instead foregrounds Vergil’s enigmatic style and questioning of the heroic myths. With an approach to the text that is both grounded in scholarship and intensely personal, and in a style both rhetorically elegant and passionate, Johnson offers readings of specific passages that are nuanced and suggestive as he focuses on the “somber and nourishing fictions” in Vergil’s poem. A timeless work of scholarship, Darkness Visible will enthrall classicists as well as students and scholars of the history of criticism—specifically the way in which politics influence modern readings of the classics—and of poetry and literature.

Dive into A Brush of Darkness, the first book in the Abby Sinclair trilogy. The man of her dreams might be the cause of her nightmares. Six months ago, Abby Sinclair was struggling to pick up the pieces of her shattered life. Now, she has an enchanted iPod, a miniature unicorn living in her underwear drawer, and a magical marketplace to manage. But despite her growing knowledge of the OtherWorld, Abby isn’t at all prepared for Brystion, the dark, mysterious, and sexy-as- sin incubus searching for his sister, convinced Abby has the key to the succubus’s whereabouts. Abby has enough problems without having this seductive shape-shifter literally invade her dreams to get information. But when her Faery boss and some of her friends vanish, as well, Abby and Brystion must form an uneasy alliance. As she is sucked deeper and deeper into this perilous world of faeries, angels, and daemons, Abby realizes her life is in as much danger as her heart—and there’s no one she can trust to save her.